Looking Out for You
by CTI-Jenn
Summary: Post episode piece from "Food for Thought."  Hawkes loves Camille but Lindsay is concerned that her friend is only going to get hurt.  How do you help someone who doesn't want to be helped?


Author's notes: I had not planned on doing a post-ep, but after watching last night's episode, I couldn't leave things the way they are. I only hope that TPTB plan on revisiting things as well. When I first heard that Sheldon and Camille were going to date, I was happy for Sheldon. Seeing the way she treated him in "Food for Thought," I wish they had not explored it. Anyone who likes her, I apologize in advance.

That being said, I absolutely loved the exchange between Danny and Lindsay on the steps. The look on Danny's face when he heard Lindsay's food order was priceless. He didn't have to say what he was thinking because it was written all over his expression. It didn't strike me as fear so much as a "Uh, is there something you've forgotten to tell me?' look.

Disclaimer: Not mine, if it were, every episode would be full of Danny/Lindsay moments.

Looking Out for You

Sheldon Hawkes looked up from his microscope as his friend and co-worker Danny Messer came into the lab. He was pretty sure Mac wouldn't have told anyone else about the results of his drug test but he swallowed nervously at first. Danny stopped at a table and started pulling out clothes from a recent crime scene. Danny looked over at him. "I'm glad to see you didn't have any subway trouble today."

Hearing no trace on censure in his friend's voice, Sheldon smiled, relieved. "Yeah, me too. I'm going to be much more careful about my subways from now on. Whatcha got there?"

'Vics clothes from the alley shooting on Dunhurst this morning. It looks like it was an accident instead of homicide but we have to check out all possibilities. What are you working on?"

"Found a scrap of paper balled up in the vic's hand in the Martin homicide from last night. Looks like it had writing on it but its pretty smeared. Trying to see if I can figure it out. I'm about ready to call it quits and see what your wife can find out from it. She sometimes seems to be able to pull evidence out of thin air. How does she do it, man?

Danny chuckled, proud of his wife's successes at work. "Lindsay is that good, that's all."

"Did I hear my name mentioned?" Lindsay Monroe Messer came in to the lab and stopped beside Danny, her hand lightly resting on his back. She looked at him, expectantly. "Did you ask him yet?"

Danny gave her a quick kiss. "I haven't had a chance to yet, Babe. Since you are here; maybe you'd like to do the honors?'

Sheldon looked confused. "Honors for what? What are you two up to and how much trouble is going to get me into?"

Lindsay rolled her eyes. "No trouble at all. Danny's mom has Lucy tonight and we are taking to rare opportunity to have an actual date. We've wanted to try that new Mediterranean restaurant that opened on 54th. We were hoping that maybe you and Camille would like to join us. I ran a check and there's been no complaints so far against the restaurant so I'm pretty hopeful it won't blow up on us or anything. What do you say? We'd love to get to know Camille better."

Danny laughed. "You might as well say yes, Doc. You know how Lindsay is when she sets her mind to something."

Sheldon nodded. "You don't have to twist my arm. Sounds like fun. Camille and I were going to do something for dinner anyway. I'll call and let her know. What time?"

The married couple exchanged a look, having a silent conversation that only comes from years of knowing someone. Lindsay looked back at him. "7 okay? It shouldn't be too crowded that early and that'll leave us time afterward to go dancing or something if we want to."

"Sounds good. We'll meet you there."

Lindsay turned to Danny and he recognized the look he gave her. He answered the question she never posed aloud. "Yes, dear, I will call and make the reservations. How about you see if you can figure out what's on that paper for Hawkes while he goes and calls Camille?"

Sheldon thanked Lindsay and left the married couple still bantering quietly as he stepped out into the corridor. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed her number. She answered on the third ring. "Hey, Sweetheart. How does that new Mediterranean restaurant sound for tonight?"

"_Sounds wonderful. What made you think of it?"_

"A couple of friends of mine from work invited us to join them. They are excited to get to know you better."

There was a pregnant pause on the other end of the line. _"Sheldon, I don't know about this. I was hoping it would just be the two of us. I never get to spend time alone with you."_

Sheldon frowned. He didn't want to fight with Camille about this but he also didn't see the problem. He figured she must be joking. "Are you kidding me? All the time we've spent together has been just the two of us. Except for the party you had with your friends the other night. I've met your friends; I'd really like you to meet mine. You'll love Danny and Lindsay. It'll be a great evening."

He heard her sigh deeply and was just about to tell her to forget it and he'd make excuses to his friends when she spoke again. He didn't pick up on the tightness in her voice. "_It's fine, baby. I'd like to meet your friends as well. I'll see you tonight."_

- CSI: NY - CSI: NY - CSI: NY -

"I can't decide between the falafel or the kabob sampler." Lindsay announced as she looked over her menu. "Maybe I should just get both."

Danny cut his eyes toward her much the same way he had when she had told him what she wanted him to bring her for brunch the other day at the crime scene. Even Sheldon looked a little surprised.

"You guys have something that you haven't told anyone yet? Like there's about to be a new littler Messer running around the lab with Lucy?" He glanced at Camille who seemed confused. "Lucy is their daughter. She even has Mac wrapped around her little finger."

Lindsay laughed. "I'm not pregnant. Everything just looks so good I want to try it all. Honestly Camille, why is that men automatically assume a woman is expecting if she expresses a healthy appetite."

Camille didn't answer Lindsay but looked at Sheldon. "I think I'm going to have the Tabouleh salad with chicken Shawarma. What about you, Baby?"

"I'm like Lindsay; it all looks good. I might go with the falafel myself. What about you Danny?"

"I may just let Miss Healthy Appetite here order everything on the menu and then eat off her plate." She slapped his arm good naturedly. Danny laughed. "Babe, how about you get the Kabob sampler and I'll get the falafel. I'll even let you try mine if you let me try yours."

Sheldon laughed and shook his head. "Only you could make sharing a dinner plate sound dirty."

Their waiter came and filled their wine glasses and took their orders. Once the four were alone again, Camille pasted a smile on her face. "I thought I put in a lot of hours as a nurse but it's nothing compared to the hours Sheldon puts in at the lab. Sometimes I wonder why he even has an apartment."

"Why do you think I married a co-worker?" Danny asked with a smirk on his face. "Some days if it weren't for work, I wouldn't see Lindsay at all."

Sheldon shook his head with a laugh. He needed this night out with friends and Camille to relax and joke. It had been a rough few days and he was happy for the release. "All this time I thought you married her because you knocked her up."

Lindsay pretended to look shocked but Sheldon knew she was joking as well. "Really Hawkes, Camille doesn't have to know all our dirty secrets the first time we have dinner together. Don't listen to either of them, Camille. Yeah, we put in a lot of hours but its worth it when we are able to put the criminals away."

Camille took a long sip of her wine before setting the glass back down. "From the way Sheldon talks about how rigid your boss is, I'm surprised he allows the two of you to work together. Wouldn't it be against policy for a married couple to work in the same department?"

Sheldon shifted uncomfortably as Lindsay and Danny shared another of those long conversation without words look. Lindsay set her wine glass back down with a frown and looked at Hawkes, surprised that he would talk so negatively about their friend and boss. "I wouldn't call Mac rigid. Sure he's tough and he makes us all toe the line but if we didn't, criminals would get to walk. As for our relationship, let's just say that Mac turned a blind eye until we proved we wouldn't let our feelings for each other get in the way of our work. He's been more than fair to us."

Again an awkward silence settled over the four. A couple of times, Danny or Lindsay would try to draw Camille into a conversation by asking her a question about her likes or interest but the nurse answered in monosyllables and a conversation couldn't get started. Sheldon looked extremely uncomfortable but was clueless as to how to make things better between the woman of his dreams and his two friends.

The waiter came and delivered their food. For awhile, eating made the silence more bearable. Conversation, when it occurred, was centered around the food. After ordering desert, Camille excused herself to the bathroom. Lindsay followed behind. She watched the attractive woman her friend had fallen for fix her make-up in the mirror. With a sigh, Lindsay approached the counter and reapplied her own lipstick.

"Camille, I'm sorry if Danny or I said something to offend you. Sheldon is our friend and I would hate for things to be awkward among us."

Camille pasted on a smile that Lindsay could tell was fake. "I'm sorry. I guess I'm just nervous about meeting Sheldon's friends. I tried to tell him it was a bad idea but he didn't want to disappoint the two of you. I'm sure he'd be the same way about meeting my friends."

Lindsay narrowed her eyes confused by Camille's statement. Why was she acting as if Sheldon hadn't met any of her friends when Lindsay knew he had attended a party with several of Camille's friends just the other night.

"I thought he met your friends at your party the other night. He was so excited to go home and get changed for it, that I finished off his evidence for him so he wouldn't run late. I figured it must have gone well since he ran so late coming in the next day. Danny had to cover for him at work."

"Does Sheldon tell people at work everything?" It sounded like a rhetorical question but Lindsay answered it anyway.

"We're not just co-workers at the lab. We all like family. We look out for each other and confide in each other. We just share our joys and our concerns. As much time as we spend together at work, it's kind of hard to have secrets."

Nervously, Camille threw her make-up bag back in her purse but in her haste, she knocked her whole purse off onto the floor. She bent down to retrieve the items and Lindsay knelt down to help her. Her hand hovered over one object and she looked from it to Camille in horror. It was a marijuana cigarette .

Camille snatched it up quickly and shoved it in her bag. She narrowed her eyes at Lindsay. "It's not what you think…"

"It's exactly what I think. That was a joint. You've been sitting at dinner with three CSI's with an illegal cigarette in your purse. Do you even understand what position that puts me in? What position it would put Sheldon in if he knew?"

"He knows." Camille straightened up all pretense of trying to be friendly gone. "Sheldon is happy with me. He loves me. Are you really going to put him in a position where you ask him to choose between me and that precious crime lab?"

"That's what you are doing to him. You could cost him his job if you are together with him during or after smoking that thing. We are routinely drug tested and we never know when it's going to happen. Those tests are incredibly sensitive and show up even a minute trace of any drug. Their screening process is completely random. I've lost count of the number of times Danny's been selected. Why he and Sheldon were both tested the other day."

Camille looked a little concerned. "When?"

"The day after your party." The color drained from Lindsay's face. "I saw him go into Mac's office the night the results came back in. I was passing by and saw that Mac looked pissed off. I thought maybe he was giving Hawkes the riot act about playing hooky but it was his drug test wasn't it? He tested positive for cannabis didn't he? Couldn't have been much or Mac would have had no choice but to fire him immediately. What happened? He was around you while you were smoking it and it got into his bloodstream that way? Damnit Camille, Sheldon worked hard to get to the position he is and he loves his job."

Camille refused to meet her gaze. "Are you so sure of your own moral superiority that you can stand here and tell me what's right for Sheldon and me? I tried it one time in my entire life. Don't stand there and make it seem like I'm some drug addict suspect you have to interrogate."

Lindsay shook her head, stunned by the venom in the other woman's tone. "That joint in your purse suggests that you aren't planning on leaving it as a one time thing. This has nothing to do with moral superiority; it has everything to do with looking out for a friend and not standing by if he's going to be hurt."

"I guess that's really up to Sheldon, now isn't it?" Without another word, she left the bathroom.

Lindsay stood there for a few more minutes trying to gather her thoughts. Her hands were shaking from her encounter with her friend's girlfriend. She returned to the table surprised to see only Danny there. He looked up at her in concern. Seeing that she was upset, he stood and hugged her.

"What happened? Camille came back to the table and abruptly told Sheldon they had to go. She looked upset but not as upset as you do. Did the two of you have words?"

With a heavy sigh, Lindsay nodded. "You could say that. I don't want to talk about it here. Do you mind if we get our desert to go and went home? I'm suddenly very tired."

Keeping his arms wrapped around her, Danny kissed the top of her head. "I've already paid the check and gotten them to box it up. We'll eat it in bed and you can tell me all about it."

- CSI: NY - CSI: NY - CSI: NY -

"You should have heard her, Sheldon. She kept going on about how I was going to ruin your life. She said I was jealous of your job and the time you spent at work and that I wanted you all to myself."

Sheldon sat on the couch next to his girlfriend and shook his head. "That doesn't sound like Lindsay. She's one of the nicest people I know. I just can't picture her verbally attacking anyone without a reason."

Camille stiffened. "You think I'm lying? She's going to try to break us up, Sheldon. She told me so. She doesn't think I'm good enough for you."

Sheldon pulled her close and kissed her. "No, she's not, Baby. I love you and nobody is going to break us up. I promise you that. I'm sorry. I thought it would be a fun evening. I wanted you to like my friends and have fun with them like I had with yours. I'm really sorry. I'll talk to Lindsay and set her straight. I promise you it's all going to be okay." He kissed her passionately.

- CSI: NY - CSI: NY - CSI: NY -

"He's going to get hurt, Danny. She's making him make choices that are going to cost him his job. Mac is already furious about him for lying about being sick; he won't take much more. And if Sheldon did test positive for drugs, even if it's only a trace, you know that it will mean they test him on a regular basis. It won't be a random draw of a name for him. If it happens again, even if it's a secondhand exposure, Mac will have to fire him."

Danny sighed as he listened to his wife explain what had happened. Their desert was in the fridge. Neither had felt like eating it when they got home. They were lying in bed still dressed with Danny holding her tightly. He kissed her. "What are you going to do? What do you want me to do? If he was completely clueless, I'd see where we have an obligation to tell him the facts. We're his friends and we owe him the truth even if it hurts. But, Babe, if he knows about it and choose to stay with her; what can we do? He's an adult and he's free to make his own decisions, even if we think they're wrong."

"I don't want to see him hurt." Lindsay admitted softly, snuggling deeper into his side.

"I don't want to either. But he's fallen hard for her; maybe he even loves her. I know what it's like to love someone so much that you would do anything to be with them. If Mac had told me when we got together that one of us would have to transfer out of the lab to be together, I would have done it in a second cause I love you that much."

The young couple locked eyes for just a second. "I wouldn't have let you do that. You love your job too much; I couldn't let you sacrifice it for me. I would have transferred."

Danny kissed her warmly. "That's the difference between you and me and Hawkes and Camille. You and I, we both love each other enough that our own happiness is tied directly into the other's. If you aren't happy, I ain't happy and vice versa. I think Hawkes feels that way about Camille but it doesn't look like she feels the same way for him. But he's going to have to decide for himself which is more important to him, Camille's happiness or his own."

"And if he get's hurt?"

"Then we're there to help him pick up the pieces."

- CSI: NY - CSI: NY - CSI: NY -

It was a couple of days later before Lindsay and Sheldon had a chance to be alone together. Lindsay was coming into the locker room as Sheldon was finishing getting his stuff out of his own locker. The young doctor looked at Lindsay and sighed, knowing there would be no getting around talking to each other. He honestly didn't know what to say to her. Didn't understand why she didn't like Camille.

She set her bag on the bench and offered him a tentative smile. "I was beginning to think you were avoiding me. Can we talk about the other night?"

"Camille told me about your fight. I don't get it Lindsay. I finally found a woman who makes me as happy as you make Danny. Why can't you be happy for me?"

Lindsay sat down and tugged lightly on Hawkes' hand until he joined her. "A couple of months after I started working here, I went out with this guy I met in a coffee shop. Gavin. Remember him?"

Hawkes eyes narrowed. "I remember I wanted to rearrange his face into a million puzzle pieces. What's he got to do with this?"

Lindsay continued although it was difficult talking about dating any guy who wasn't Danny. "I was so head over hills. My first honest-to-God New York boyfriend and relationship. I wasn't going to let anything or anyone mess it up. Not even when he started demonstrating a temper. I was a cop but I was stupid enough not to see that it was wrong the way he yelled at me and belittled me over the smallest things. I overlooked the handprint bruises he left when he would grab and shake me in a argument. Then one day you saw one of the bruises."

Hawke remembered it well. It was in this very locker room. She hadn't seen him come in as she removed her jacket to change into her lab coat. He'd been livid when he saw the bruises that could only mean someone was hurting his friend. He had confronted her right then and there. "I made you tell me who had hurt you. You made all the classic excuses for him. I warned you of all the things that could happen if you stayed with him. You thanked me for my concerned and told me you could handle it."

Lindsay gave his hand a squeeze. "You didn't like my decision and told me you were looking out for me. If I wasn't ready to listen right then, then you would be there for me when I was. I wish I had listened to you. And when you were right, you were there when I needed you without the first hint of 'I told you so' on your lips."

Hawkes nodded. He remembered the night she showed up at his door at 2:30 in the morning with a black eye, a sprained wrist, and horrible bruises around her throat. He had taken care of her injuries, held her as she cried, and promised not to let anyone at the lab find out about the abuse. She'd been lucky that when she'd finally made the break from Gavin, that her injuries weren't worse. "What does this have to do with you not liking Camille?"

"She's hurting you, Hawkes. Maybe not physically like Gavin hurt me but she's still hurting you. You've gotten into trouble with Mac a couple of times now because of her. Trouble that could cost you your job. I want to look out for you the way you looked out with me."

"I can handle Mac. Don't worry about it; I'm not the first person to get caught playing hooky from work. You can't compare Camille to Gavin for that." He couldn't quite meet her gaze because he didn't want to her to see his guilt over the drug test.

"I saw the joint in Camille's purse. She didn't tell you that did she?" She made him look her in the eye and knew that she hadn't. "I figured out your drug test the other day didn't come back clean. If she's choosing to use an illegal substance in your presence then yeah she's just as bad as Gavin and the results could be just as devastating. I could have lost my life but you could lose your job. I don't want to see you go through that. I care too much about you as a friend." She reached out and rested her hand on his cheek.

"I love her and I'm not ready to give up on this relationship. I love you for caring enough to worry, but you aren't going to be able to convince me to break up with her any more than I could convince you that day in this locker room about Gavin." He covered her hand with his own.

"I figured as much. I've debated over and over again about whether or not I should even say anything to you at all. But I finally realized I had speak up even if you didn't want to hear what I had to say. That doesn't mean I'm not going to keep looking out for you though. I'm your friend and even if I don't agree with your choices I'm still going to be there for you. Just like you were there for me when you didn't agree with mine. I hope your relationship with Camille turns out differently than mine did with Gavin. If it does, nobody will be happier than I will be. If it doesn't, know that you can come to me. I'll be there to help you pick up the pieces. No 'I told you so,' just a friendly shoulder."

They rose and hugged each other. Neither one was completely satisfied with how they were leaving the situation but both were willing agree to disagree. No matter what the outcome of his relationship with Camille, it wouldn't come between their friendship. Hawkes pulled away from the hug.

"I gotta go. I'm meeting Camille for breakfast before she goes to work." He started to leave and then stopped and turned back to her, a puzzled look on his face. " Hey Linds., did you ever tell Danny about Gavin?"

She shook her head. "Are you kidding? Even five years later he would hunt Gavin down and kill him. Have a good breakfast."

He nodded and then he was gone. Lindsay sighed and put her things in the locker. Whatever might happen, Hawkes would be okay. She and the rest of the lab would make sure of it.

- CSI: NY -

Author's Note 2: Okay, when I first sat down to write this, I wanted someone to give Sheldon a swift kick in the rear end and for him to wise up. But I finally decided to make it a little more like real life, especially since the episode left Camille and Sheldon together. I'd love to know what you think. Did I totally miss the mark?


End file.
